The column in Thursday's Wall Street Journal reviewed the 2013 vintage for Bordeaux, a perfect storm of climatic misery that included unusual spring cold, hail, heat and high humidity. "In the past we wouldn't have made a wine in 2013," Jacques Thienpont told writer Wes Lyons during a visit to Pomerol earlier this month. Thienpont produced just 13 barrels of his famed Le Pin wine. "We can only make what nature throws at us."

Throughout the summer, Lyons wrote, "workers removed excess leaves and trimmed the bunches, helping ripen grapes. Once in the winery, they could painstakingly select the best fruit and use hi-tech equipment to extract the appealing fruit flavors.

"The results are light wines characterized by freshness and low alcohol levels. In many ways, after the super-ripe, concentrated years of 2009 and 2010, this is a return to a traditional style of red Bordeaux—albeit without the weight of a good vintage."

What squeezed the life out of Bordeaux's vintage last year has been duplicated elsewhere globally over the past couple of decades, one of the subjects of Dr. Gregg Jones at last month's Eastern Winery Exposition in Lancaster, Pa. Jones, the Oregon Wine Press 2009 Person of the Year, produces groundbreaking work on climate change and grapegrowing at Southern Oregon University, where he's a professor.

One of the associated topics he covered in a subsequent conversation dealt with the changing climate's impact on those who drink wine. Stylistically, he said, wine has evolved over the past couple years, partly because of climate and partly because of consumer tastes.

"If you really think about what's going on, it's all
about how we hear things through the media and our purchasing habits relative to
all of that. And I'll give you a great example.

Bordeaux ... sells wine differently than the rest of the world does, through futures. But 2013 was a difficult year for them. This was again
another climate variability issue. It was still a relatively warm year, but
they had a lot of rain and a lot of hail, and fruit just ripened irregularly, and 2013
may be one of the worst years in Bordeaux's past 100-year history. And so consumers
will know that. They'll read and hear about that in the media, they'll potentially
tell it from the wine characteristics that they are drinking, and so how long does
it take people to come back to Bordeaux after a year like last year?

"You know,
there's some real interesting questions around that. So here's a situation in the Eastern United States. New York . . . many of the major wine producing areas [there]have already been declared
major disaster areas. So this coming year, how much fruit will be able to be
produced in New York, and how good will it be relative to wine that can make it to
market? If there's not a lot of product at market, then the consumer typically
would respond to that. They may turn to something else. And then do they turn
back when maybe next year's [or] the year after's crop is bigger.

"But whenever there is a down year," he continued, "whether it's down because of
quality or volume, consumers do kind of respond to that. They often switch off
to something else. I guess the question when we have these kinds of things: Do
you recapture those consumers when your quality and/or quantity comes back?"